It's a public secret that there are many people with complaints about Mac OS X's Finder. It lacks several features common to other file managers, and on top of that, it has several issues with dealing with some types of network shares (SAMBA, specifically). While third parties can't fix the bugs, they can extend the Finder's feature set. TotalFinder is a collection of Finder extensions that tries to bring some of Google Chrome's interface ideas to the Finder. BinaryAge was kind enough to provide me with a free license so I could give a quick review of TotalFinder.

Exactly! For me "folders first" is one of the major annoyance in Windows Explorer. E. g. having some 1000 folders *and* files in a FS based repo and you want to quickly navigate to the first FILE starting with "org. apache", you simply entering the first letters 'org' which brings you *MEEP - ZERO POINTS FOR EXPLORER* to the first FOLDER starting with the 'org'. From there, you manually scroll down some hundred entries till you get to the file part.

So TotalFinder might be good for the people that like Finder to behave like they are used to from some other file manager but that does not make Finder a broken piece of software. Most long term Mac users have a rather different view on such things.

Well, for me folders are for organization and files are for content, so it makes sense to have them separated. Also, if I need some files that are buried in 5 levels of folders and these folders are also full with files, it's nice to be able to navigate quickly.

So, to sum it up ... files and folders are different and mean different things and don't belong mixed.

On the other hand I've just checked your example, and Windows Explorer in Win7 matches the first file OR folder after the cursor.